His father had no newspapers, no news, no nothing of how things in America were, so this was something his father could not directly contradict, even though it seemed highly improbable, well nigh impossible, from the perspective of a man who had lived in a country where the state of the economy had been a disaster for the last twenty years but was, according to government announcements, twenty years improving. His father also wondered, more than once, how it was that he, Aziz, could talk by phone to Mourad in Boston when the family in Algeria could not. Aziz told him the international calls were too expensive for Mourad to afford. “But we will call him,” his father insisted. “We will find a way to talk to him.” No, no, Aziz countered, we cannot let you go to that expense. He, Aziz, had a job in New York, and so he could afford to call home and relay all the news of Mourad. It was better this way. Did they believe this cavalcade of lies? Sometimes he didn’t care if they didn’t.

Chapter 20

20

There were lemon tree orchards all around it, but the village was not much more than alleys of mutilated bushes, its parks untended, grass gone to seed. They were in the Mitidja, not far from Haouch Gros. The village’s militia, a small band of farmers and herders, had killed Antar’s father and taken his sisters to the prison in Berrouaghia. The younger sister was under torture: kdoulha esslah—guest treatment—they called it. Soon word reached Antar that Khalida, his other sister, had told the woman who brought her water in her cell, “They beat me so much that I have become like a small black olive.”

Now there was nothing Antar did not believe was his right. There were those among Antar’s men who took to depravity the way birds take to air. They had imaginations bloated with ways to inflict suffering, and they saw the permutated hell of their nighttimes as an underground heaven they had never hoped to enter. Then there were those who were sickened into a dullness they believed made their acts less vicious because they took no pleasure in them. And then there was Aziz, who died each death in crushing closeness, because to numb, he believed, was to lose the cunning and the propellant to escape.